


Manipulation of Focus

by Exis



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-03
Updated: 2014-09-03
Packaged: 2018-02-16 01:06:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2250123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Exis/pseuds/Exis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reid loses his patience with the 'virgin' routine and proves a point.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Manipulation of Focus

They must have had a DJ. The booth was probably in some back office somewhere, hidden out of sight. It was a weird choice and that stuck out to him. The music was too sensitive to the undulating crowd, picking up on subtle signals given out en masse, to be a simple playlist. No perceivable juke box ruled that out as an option. If there was a DJ, however, he or she was intentionally out of sight. The presence of someone would probably tip the atmosphere over the edge from crowded, happy bar into night club. It was certainly the former that had lured them there tonight, but the later seemed infused in his muscles. The layers of sound from the skillful technician were having a stronger impact than he had predicted. It might have been the fine sheen of booze in his blood stream or the general moodiness he’d felt lately. He felt the beat on a molecular level. 

“Spencer!” 

It was snapped from Prentiss, who had noticed his trance and retreat into the edges of an overstuffed chair. He had apparently not responded a few times to make her use his first name. The brandy in his hand was still cool against to his touch, he hadn’t been “gone” for long. Making brief eye contact, he straightened himself. 

“Sorry. I lost myself for a moment. Did you know this band actually recorded this…”  
“I was trying to ask you to pass that coaster,” she interrupted.  
“Oh,” he dropped, handing over the item. 

It was unusual for them all to be here. Hotch had a rare night off due to an abrupt slumber party. Rossi was just in the mood. Everyone else just had nowhere better to be. The bad guy was in holding; the case was rubber stamped. This was the measure of it. 

“Reid, what’s on your agenda tonight,” purred Morgan. He was drunk. Not, “confess my secrets” drunk but drunk enough, enough to start this game for the amusement of the masses. It was sweet, it was well-intentioned. It fucking bugged him. 

“The brandy’s sweet, the company is good…” he trailed off. It wouldn’t appease, but he hoped to turn his wide gestures into a dismissive air.  
“I can’t help but notice that the ladies here are sweet as well...” Morgan nodded, gesturing towards the dance floor.  
“Notice all you want.”  
“C’mon kid. I know it’s been busy lately, but you gotta…”  
“JESUS!” 

It surprised him. One second he was under water, waves of sound. Suddenly he was yelling, fragile in his volume and outrage.  
The attention, previously spread equally among the nodes of the group, snapped to Reid and Morgan. Whatever languor had temporarily acted unabated in his body was instantly released. A kind of tension and alertness replaced the softness in a mechanical way. Making eye contact in the most direct way possible, Reid softened his eyes. 

“You never asked. Not once.”  
“Asked what?”  
“Whatever it is you all want to know. Am I gay? Am I a virgin? When was the last time? How many? How much? Why? We all promise not to profile each other but that’s what you’ve all been doing. All this time”. 

The glossy eyes of hurt feelings turned towards him in a spectacular coordination. Everyone wanting to apologize; no one wanting to apologize. 

Hands up in the defensive, he tries to take it back. “It’s fine. Really. I get it, I do.” 

Garcia jumped in to say, “Baby, no one was profiling you! We just didn’t want,” but he can’t hear it. He knows what they didn’t want to ask or know. He knows all too well the blank space that fills in the end of that sentence. 

“It’s fine” he reiterated. 

Morgan, his eyes tinged with the finest edge of shame, tried for the save. “We should have asked,” lamely trips out. Pity.  
“You know what,” Reid starts, raising an eyebrow, “You’re right. Tonight’s the night. Let’s see if you can ‘school’ me”. The brandy is discarded to the crowded table before the protests reach his mind. His finger is in his tie knot, yanking it free from the collar. It felt good. Next, he yanked his sweater off, dropping both discarded items on the chair he had previous occupied. Uncuffing his dress shirt, he twisted the sleeves up his arms in a careful, casual way. 

He felt a hand tug him from behind, but he was already moving. The music that had previously swallowed him takes center stage in his mind. He is walking towards the dance floor. 

Had he looked back, he’d have seen the horrified expressions of everyone else. It was a train wreck waiting to happen: public humiliation. Their eyes full of remorse and fear might have drawn him back. But from the minute he touched his tie, his eyes were drawn from them. They scanned with a casual but direct focus, moving from person to person.

They watched. They watched him raise himself up and walk with purpose. They waited for the fumbling, the apologies, the battered pick up line flicked down with distain. But instead, they watched Reid stop, stock still, in the middle of the crashing crowd. His eyes locked on a single woman close to the wall. What it was about her would remain a secret to them. She was alone, sure, but so were others. She was more or less pretty in an objective way. Like a possessed person, he met her eyes and held them. She was taken aback for a moment. She tried to politely break the gaze, turning away from him in all but focus. A few moments passed and her body corrected itself right into his path. Only when she was reduced to shuffling her feet back and forth did he proceed to walk towards her. 

Reid could dance. This revelation hit them all at once. 

He wasn’t an amazing dancer. No Fred Astaire waltzes, no particularly complicated moves. But he was steady on the beat and he created a loose, attractive friction with the woman he was holding. It was the eye contact that made them all feel voyeuristic. He held her eyes with his the whole time. His lips never moved. The flush and twitch in his partner was so obvious, so needy, that they felt wrong to watch and yet compelled to do so anyway. The song switched but his eyes never wavered. It felt like the seconds passed in agony.

Perhaps it was fortunate for everyone that the woman he’d selected was less patient. She was drunker than Reid, not sloshed but looser around the edges in her movements. Reaching for her purse, she held her car keys out to him with the question and the answer plastered all over her face. 

Reid just smirked, took the keys in a playful snatch, and pointed her towards the door. He returned to the table for just a moment, neither looking nor avoiding the gaze of anyone in particular. Morgan thought briefly of stopping him. He wanted to tell him he had nothing to prove, that they were sorry, and this seemed wrong in some meaningful way. Hotch had the strangest urge to forcibly stop Reid from leaving. Despite the fact that Reid engineered the whole…whatever it was they just watched…he couldn’t break that niggling feeling in him that he was going to be hurt. The thoughts, however, never materialized into action. Reid simply snatched up his discarded clothing, dropped a fifty on the table, grabbed his bag and left. 

Though no one said it out loud, it signaled the end of the night. The group started that slow shuffle of getting out of the bar  
___________________________

No one said anything in the bullpen. Perhaps no one knew what to say. Joke about getting laid were right out. Apologies seemed worse. It finally broke open on the plane. 

In the back corner, Reid was anxiously scanning a stack of files that he moved in his own particular brand of organized and frantic. He was jotting notes on a small, graph-lined moleskin. Morgan was staring. He wasn’t thinking about the night in the bar. He was thinking about the moleskin. Why would Reid take notes? I mean, he understood taking notes as a general idea but this kid could do most mathematician’s wet dream equations in his head. He knew that he often wrote it down for them, used visual cues to clue them into what his massive brain was twitching over. But these notes seemed personal, like he was putting down information for his own reasons. Why? These thoughts kept tumbling through Morgan’s head and he was visually locked on to Reid. 

“I’m Bisexual, I suppose. I guess you’d have to say that. Gender never really mattered much to me, it all just seems like accessories and social roles I never really understood in the first place. It’s really more about the person. No, obviously. 84 days, 7 hours, 12 minutes. Somewhere between 10 and 15, depending on how you want to classify certain, um, acts. It really depends on the unit of measurement. And because sex is a biological imperative that none of us can escape. Plus I’m very good at it”. 

Despite saying these facts to the folder he was scanning, he has a kind of twisted smile that fully reached his eyes. Having finished, he abruptly met Morgan’s eyes. “Those are the answers to your questions,” Reid said with his laser-like attention fully fixed on the other man. If Morgan had been thinking about that night, he might have said something back, but Spencer was quicker. 

“Do you know the group of students statistically most likely to leave high school without their virginity? Teenagers who opt to join band. Everyone assumes the football players and the cheerleaders are the most promiscuous but their social structure is far too dependent on popularity and community approval. Band participants have both motive and opportunity. They are socially outcast from the larger group, but socially accepted and appreciated within their own cloistered social unit. They also spend a lot of time in hotels and busses while traveling, thus providing them with spaces of independence and ease, so to speak. The hierarchy of instruments and skill level leads to natural subgroups and creates an ideal environment for sexual exploration”. 

The group’s attention, while previously scattered, had of course turned towards Reid and Morgan.

“Reid, I’m really sorry about that night. I mean it. I took it too far and you were right to call me on it. It was none of our business, we were just worried,” but he never finished because he was interrupted. 

“You were just worried,” and he paused here, softening his tone, “That I was missing out on fulfilling social and romantic relationships out of fear or discomfort. You worried that the human need for contact and companionship, perhaps even the physical need for sexual release, was something I was unable to comfortably obtain.” He set aside the folder he was holding. “I told you in the bar, I get it.”

“Well, we were wrong, I guess,” Emily chimed in in a bright, and cheerful way. “You’ve got mad game. Well done”. 

He smirked again. “I said 84 days.” Her confusion registered, but only for a second. 

“You mean,”

“I faked a work emergency, kissed her goodnight, dropped her and her car home safely, and caught a cab”. A knot in the back of Hotch’s mind, though he hadn’t been aware of its lingering presence, unwound itself. It felt, in the cabin, as though a lot of people holding their breath had released it all at once. “I wanted to settle the question as to whether it could be done, but I had no interest in her. She was simply the person there who represented the highest crossover of socially acceptable attractiveness and statistical willingness to leave the bar with a new and unfamiliar sexual partner. Besides, she was drunk and I overheard her friends arguing that she shouldn’t drive herself earlier. I might have saved her life”. 

Morgan’s face broke into a grin. Something warm ran through him. “Still though, that was tight”. 

“That was a manipulation of focus and body awareness. If you want to see ‘tight’,” this word sounded wrong and dirty in Reid’s voice, which was weirdly thrilling, “you should come to Copenhagen. I’m giving a keynote on complex manifolds in four weeks”. 

“Is that a math joke,” Emily snickered, “Cause I don’t get it”. 

“No, I’m trying to explain what I meant when I said teenagers who participate in band are more likely to get laid”. Again, the sound of Reid casually verbalizing ‘get laid’ in front of the group was throwing everyone a little off-kilter. “You can use a lot of adjectives to describe the Cal-Tech math department but ‘celibate’ isn’t one of them”. 

For the first time since he had unknotted his tie in the bar, there was an edge of bravado, a quirky confidence, that crept into Spencer. He continued, “Turning eighteen was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I finally got to stop quoting the age of consent laws in California every time one of my undergrads tried making a pass at me during office hours. Calculating wave functions in my head might not be a turn-on for some people, but you guys are not the only people I know”. 

His eyes cast to his audience and he couldn’t help but feel a little gratified at the curious disbelief and, maybe he was over-thinking it, arousal in his colleagues’ expressions. It was harmless and genial, but he felt satisfied. He mentally decided to push the envelope just a little further. 

“The participating universities assigned all the speakers an envoy of sorts for the conference. Mine sent me this, um, picture so I could,” and he twisted his fingers into air quotes, “identify her at the airport”. He flipped open his phone, calling up the photo with a twist of his thumb. Casually, leaning back into his seat, he tossed the phone to Morgan. Wickedness crossed his face as he asked sarcastically, “So Morgan, what do you think of my chances?” 

“SHUT UP!” Emily shouted as she contorted her body to glance at the screen over Morgan’s shoulders. Morgan just whispered, “Damn,” before handing the phone back to Reid. 

All of a sudden Hotch laughed. He didn’t snicker or smile, he broke out into a full, rich laugh that punctuated the moment with a kind of gleeful resonance. All the focus that had been honed in on Reid suddenly twisted itself to Hotch as he tried, and failed, to control himself. “God,” he whispered to the back of his hand between bursts, “I’m sorry, I just,” and he rolled his body forward to stop the sounds he was making. “It’s just,” and the laugh broke open once more. 

The strangeness of the moment evaporated in the best possible way. Reid talked about sex and Hotch laughed; it was as though those two statistical impossibilities canceled each other out and normalcy returned as if by magic. 

Not one to miss his cue, Reid gathered the folders and stood to sit across from Rossi who had watched the whole scene with little reaction except amusement. Reid grabbed his moleskin, and it suddenly occurred to Morgan he hadn’t corrected Reid about why he was staring. Reid began to explain his burgeoning theories about the unsub they were on their way to catch. Everyone’s eyes seemed to either turn back to work or their own personal musings. It was Prentiss who rose to sit next to Morgan, eyes conspiratorial. 

“Well?” she asked, not really needed to elaborate.  
“Man, I am just thinking about how much Garcia is going to hate that she missed this”.  
Emily surreptitiously held up her phone. He wasn’t familiar with the app she was using, but he was pretty sure that the red button meant ‘record’. “Way ahead of you,” she said before breaking into a lazy smile?  
“Even Hotch laughing?”  
“Are you kidding? That’s going to be my new ringtone!”  
“If you let Garcia get her hands on that, it’s going to be everyone’s new ringtone. That or the dulcet tones of Dr. Spencer Reid saying the words ‘get laid’. I’m not sure which would be weirder.” Morgan paused, suddenly filled with an idea. “You have GOT to send that to her as soon as we land,” he said with mischievous eyes.  
“Why’s that?”  
“We’re going to need her to get started on tracking down what, exactly, the good doctor was doing 84 days ago”. 

And with that, Emily Prentiss—in the most loving way possible—elbowed Derick Morgan directly in the ribs.


End file.
